It feels like "progress" and "change" are glacial. I'm about to turn 50. I have been in tech since I was 23.
When I first entered the workforce there were more people doing the same amount of work than happens today. From 93-2000 I watched tons of companies lay off staff and spread the work to the remaining people. Then the same thing happened in 2008-10. Then the same thing happened over the last 5 years.
The new normal (because of the decades of change):
No one has time or space to focus, everyone is asked to do too much. So no one has time to do quality work so we feel like our work is shitty and we can't take pride in our work - yet we spend most of our waking hours hours doing that work. Which impacts our quality of life and increases our stress levels.
That reflects my experience. To top it off, your healthcare (including mental health) being tied to your job makes the layoff even more anxiety inducing.
It's not everyone though. The article is specifically about the disparity between the newest entrants and those who came before.
But Gen Zers, who are just beginning their career journeys, are having an especially difficult time. In a 2022 survey by the meditation app Calm, 58% of Gen Zers said they felt anxious frequently or all the time — a big jump from the one-third of Gen Xers and one-quarter of baby boomers who said the same. A Deloitte survey of 22,000 people from March found a similar result: Nearly half of Gen Zers said they felt anxious and stressed almost all the time, while only 39% of millennials said they felt the same.
In a survey conducted by Gallup, nearly half of workers ages 18 to 29 reported that their job had negatively affected their mental health. In some cases, the stress of the workplace manifests as a sense of ambivalence and withdrawal from their professional lives. Another Gallup survey found that Gen Z was the least engaged group in the workplace and the most burned out from their jobs.
The lower end of the cohort has barely worked long enough to be worrying about layoffs or lack of pride in their work. My own career only started at 30. This is the generation that bullied parents and teachers around for years with weaponized psychobabble and made pronoun enforcement a thing (like we live in a goddamn MUSH).
Now they're entering the workplace and finding that being a master wordsmith of Reddit rhetoric doesn't translate to economic value. Their only path to success involves cancelling everyone critical of them to invoke the Peter Principle, and if they can't do that, they melt down.
Gen Z is stressed out because the world is incredibly expensive and competitive for them in a way it wasn’t for elder millennials and other older generations.
Or maybe they are the youngest cohort now in the workforce and so get the least interesting jobs and the least slack. Soul of a New Machine quotes Tom West saying (roughly), The problem with brain-dead jobs is that you go home too tired to do anything.
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It feels like "progress" and "change" are glacial. I'm about to turn 50. I have been in tech since I was 23.
When I first entered the workforce there were more people doing the same amount of work than happens today. From 93-2000 I watched tons of companies lay off staff and spread the work to the remaining people. Then the same thing happened in 2008-10. Then the same thing happened over the last 5 years.
The new normal (because of the decades of change):
No one has time or space to focus, everyone is asked to do too much. So no one has time to do quality work so we feel like our work is shitty and we can't take pride in our work - yet we spend most of our waking hours hours doing that work. Which impacts our quality of life and increases our stress levels.
Maybe that's why everyone is anxious.
That reflects my experience. To top it off, your healthcare (including mental health) being tied to your job makes the layoff even more anxiety inducing.
It's not everyone though. The article is specifically about the disparity between the newest entrants and those who came before.
The lower end of the cohort has barely worked long enough to be worrying about layoffs or lack of pride in their work. My own career only started at 30. This is the generation that bullied parents and teachers around for years with weaponized psychobabble and made pronoun enforcement a thing (like we live in a goddamn MUSH).
Now they're entering the workplace and finding that being a master wordsmith of Reddit rhetoric doesn't translate to economic value. Their only path to success involves cancelling everyone critical of them to invoke the Peter Principle, and if they can't do that, they melt down.
Gen Z is stressed out because the world is incredibly expensive and competitive for them in a way it wasn’t for elder millennials and other older generations.
That’s really all there is to it.
Or maybe they are the youngest cohort now in the workforce and so get the least interesting jobs and the least slack. Soul of a New Machine quotes Tom West saying (roughly), The problem with brain-dead jobs is that you go home too tired to do anything.